prehistoric laptop - which linux?

[mistafeesh]

I've just been given a cast-off laptop.it's a pentium 133 with 16mb Ram and a 2g HDD. It's a brand I've never heard of - it's an ACi (allied computer industries) amethyst.

I'd like to install linux on the beast, as I want to do a bit of writing. I've flirted with linux before - in the forms of suse and ubuntu, but I realise this is going to need a fairly basic installation. As long as I can run open office or similar, I'm not too worried....

Any suggestions?

PS it's running windows 95 at the moment, and it's slower than a slow thing wading through treacle...

 

[Vybuni]

DSL or one of the really lightweight distros should work fine.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

 

[macdude425]

You won't be able to, I can guarantee it. Even with 64MB RAM and 500MB swap XMMS barely loads.

At this time, you're looking at text only.

 

[Disillusion]

Xubuntu

 

[trekkie00]

Xubuntu

On a 133 with only 16mb RAM, that's really doubtful. It barely ran on my 233 with 192mb, and I think it needs at least 64 megs. AFAIK, DSL would be your best bet unless you were willing to just use shell.

 

[mistafeesh]

I'm going to give DSL a try first... I looked into xubuntu already, and it looks like it needs more resources than I've got. I'm also going to dig around to try and find the RAM to see what type, and how easy it'll be to upgrade it a bit.

If all else fails, I'll stick to w95 - yuk!

 

[jakec]

here are some Distros for you to look at, I haven't used all of them but I'd highly recomend Austrumi, Slackware, puppy. Although I haven't used all of these distros they looked promising

feather Linux
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/

DSL
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Puppy Linux
http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=3

Slackware
http://www.slackware.com/

Spinx Linux
http://www.ibiblio.org/spinix/

Crux Linux
http://crux.nu

DLX Linux
http://www.wu-wien.ac.at/us...

FreeSCO
http://www.freesco.info

Dettu Linux
http://hobbingen.uni-muenst...

hal91 Floppy Linux
http://jspiro.tripod.com/li...

alinux
http://www.ibiblio.org/peanut/

pocket Linux
http://www.pocket-lnx.org/

tomsrtbt
http://www.toms.net/rb/

Zip Ham
http://zipham.free.fr/

Grey cat Linux
http://home.wanadoo.nl/pete...

AlphaLinux
http://alfalinux.sourceforg...

SpyLinux
http://www.bluesine.com/Pro...

tty Linux
http://www.informatik.uni-b...

Bootable Business Card
http://open-projects.linuxc...

Small Linux
http://www.superant.com/sma...

Basic Linux
http://www.volny.cz/basicli...

ADIOS
http://dc.qut.edu.au/adios/

Austrumi
http://cyti.latgola.lv/ruun...

Zenwalk
http://www.zenwalk.org/

ThinTux
http://www.thintux.org/


EDIT:

Almost forgot Flash Linux, a Linux distro designed specifically for USB keys: http://flashlinux.org.uk/

you can find more here http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Mini_Distributions/

hope this Helps,

Jake

 

[The General]

Time to toss it.

 

[smallblock]

Tiny Linux?

 

[MajorHertz]

I got red hat running on a similar laptop (Dell CP but about hte same specs). I installed base packages then X and blackbox and it runs smoothly. Doubt you can get KDE or Gnome running well but blackbox isnt bad.